They say, "Gee, there goes another veteran, going up to the Hovel for for a 32 ounce mug of good beer for half a dollar. Wow, I wish I could belong to the Idaho Legion!"

But you know something, Shame? I'll betcha our Legion friends in Gore River, Little Current, and Espanola would LOVE to talk to you about your disparaging remarks about veterans. You get quite a kick out of such a talk...several, in fact.

They say "How odd--he is usually driven by a chauffeur in his El Dorado!"

Shane, your tongue has been wagging too much and has stretched so far you are running the risk of wrapping it around your own neck. It may not have been brought to your attention, but in the world, people die when they grow too offensive to other people. Is that what you want?

Now Amos.... Shame has the mind of an infant, and you don't teach an infant by capital punishment. I think I'll simply call some friends in, say, Sudbury and arrange for them to simply kick the shi...rearrange his face to a more pleasing aspect. The other would entail FAR FAR too much work for the local street cleaners and would leave Shame so very severely depleted in mass he might well blow away.

Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have. Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital. One day while they were walking past the hospital swimmingpool, Ralph suddenly Jumped into the deep end.

He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom and pulled him out. When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna's heroic act, she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, 'Edna, I have good news and bad news. The good news is you're being discharged, since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love. I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.

The bad news is Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him. I am so sorry, but he's dead.'

Well, you're the guy who keeps asserting he is Mom's favorite spawn. Rank hath its responsibilities, you know. Some of us were out pursuing honest labor and other stuff.

I am just on a short break from digging a ditch in which we will plant climbing flowering plants to build a screen of delight along out back fence to assuage the neighbor down the hill who want to plonk a six foot board fencer along our property line, uglifying the whole back yard perspective. Very bad idea by a gal with a profoundly fixed idea that board fences are normal. Hopefully we will out-create her notion with a screen of lovely flowered vines that still lets the sunlight dapple through into our patio.

In the course of digging this ditch I found that PVC pipe I had laid for sprinkling the back yard hedge -- about five years back, it was. Well, at least I found half of it.

It's for home despots who have been deprived of their primary role in life when the people living with them all moved away and left them alone, rattling around in an empty house with no one else to rule over despotically.

Can you imagine the despair and feelings of purposelessness that follow? Think of Hitler or Mussolini trapped on an island with no other people around to command and you get the picture.

A lonesome home despot can, of course, get a dog or cat to boss around...dog usually works better for this...but it's nothing more than a bandaid approach to what is really a very serious and devastating psychological problem.

Lonesome Home Despots often react to their plight by viciously defending their outdoor property against all trespassers such as squirrels, birds, dogs, cats, chipmunks, bugs, neighbours, and worst of all...the neighbours' children!!!!!!! (regarding the latter, though, they are much less common than they once were, because most of them are sitting indoors at home playing video games all day rather than playing outside)

Are you a lonesome home despot with no one else around anymore to bully and pick on? Contact the LHDAA and get help now before it's too late!

A quick news bulletin: I've had my friend Susie's chocolate lab here since January 12 (hit by a car - shattered pelvis, head injury). She has been out of the hospital for a month now, but we know Zeke is too strong and could easily knock her over.

A stray min pin turned up at my back gate last night, wanting to go play with the dogs. I bathed him, put him in the wire kennel, and this morning Susie and I took him to the vet. His chip led to a previous owner who relinquished the dog when he learned Susie would like to adopt him. Max is 5 years old, 13 pounds and is like walking a yoyo on a string. Zeke is still here with me and my dogs, and Susie has a dog companion again. I'm sure over time all of the dogs will get together, but for now, we'll let Max get used to walking just with Susie.

MOM just blubbered quietly in her beer when I told her this happy little story!

Hot and muggy here today. Will one of you guys set up the sprinkler next to the wading pool? I think we'll be in and out of the water today to stay cool. And be sure the cooler is filled with ice and beer.

The ditch was dug, the pipe repaired, the planting holes made right and the new plantings planeted--a voracious and ebullient bougainvillea in the corner and three small Ceanothis plants that will rapidly grow wide and tall and vivid blue. Then we laid down stones around them to act as heat sinks near the stems and mulch outside the stones, and gave each of the Ceanothus thirty gallons of water as a kickoff. They are native plants and will never see or need that much water again, but this is a recommended starter technique. I crawled into bed aching in joints that weren't designed to be joints and muscles that God never intended me to find, but the job was done.

Home despots anonymous is a very fine idea, LH. I should think they could take up worm farming to compensate for having driven away all their families.

Poor old crippled up disabled veteran, alone and forgotten, his memories fading like the medals that he has....

Did I ever mention my part in the Battle of the Atlantic? I was conning a destroyer, escorting a convoy, fighting a Force 7 gale in early December. The North Atlantic is cold that time of year and a hot cup of coffee is sometimes the only thing that keeps you going. Suddenly sonar reported a U-boat waiting ahead! I rang General Quarters and full speed. We got off a cluster of hedgehogs and then rolled three. Sonar reported sounds of break-up and an oil slick slowly appeared on the surface. We radioed COMATLANFLT about our success and received a warm reply. A very warm reply, since it was 1967 and the West German government was somewhat upset about the whole thing.

Just for those who don't know, the French Croix de Gare is one of the Stations of the Cross in the French version of reality. They also have a Croix de Guerre for people who fight well on the correct side.

My son called me on Father's Day and said thank you for all t6he wise instruction which he had ignored over the years, as he was now discovering, hard though it was to admit, that Dad was right about most things. I told him I had been working on the wrong assumption, to try and tell him the rightest things I could think of, when what I should have done is give him calculatedly terrible advice, counting on him not to take it. I told him it was OK, though, his brand of intransigent self-determination runs in the family.

It was a good talk!

Last night we went to a party to celebrate two graduations of some dear friends of the younger set; amazing what a bright, high-energy creative and thoughtful generation we have coming up behind. I feel optimistic about the future of humanity when I see these guys operating.

Hey, with all of the war and battles you guys hash and rehash, has any of you traced the steps of battles in the War of 1812? Today would be a good day to start. If you traced Lewis and Clark's steps, this should be just up your alley. A bit more moving in circles, though, I imagine.

I was allowed to help take down the flag at Ft. McHenry during the evening Retreat Ceremony. One of the others (it's a BIG flag!) was descended from someone on one of the warships which bombarded the fort back in the day. He thought it funny that he could help haul down the flag while his ancestor had tried all night without success.

Youse American flipheads always retreat when you see the McBrides advancin'! We have flippin' drove you from the field time and again, eh? My fambly has a long flippin' histry of victry wherever we go. That is why North Ontario has remaned safe and not been took over by the flippin' USA or the Russians or the Chinese eether.

There was a little trouble with the French now and then, but we have kept them basicly in check fer the most part. The only flippin' thing they ever forced us to do was to take French in school! An outrage! It is not a real langwage like English, eh? It was made up by some perofessers in Paris back in...like...the 1500's? Anyways, they made it up them selves and then forced other people to speak it by passin' a law that said they HAD to. And now all Canadians have to learn it in school. Like I said, it's a outrage!

My fambly has always spoke English. You can go right back to the Bible OR Darwin for proof on that. English was the first flippin' langwage ever spoke on Earth and it is still the best one to this flippin' day.

Those great big flags are called garrison flags. We flew one each at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. When you had to take them down at the end of the day it was a real struggle to catch it and hold it up until you could fold it.

Even more impressive in those old forts are the central spines, or keels, which form the backbone of themain buildings (where the flags are flown). They were hand-built and installed by specialists, back in the day, known as Garrison Keelers.

Regarding mind...I think that any form of consciousness or self-awareness at all indicates some degree of mind, does it not? And Shane is clearly self-aware, just not in any way that has proven particularly useful to himself or anyone else thus far.

Rapparee, with his Francaise execrable has demonstrated the vaporous map to perfection. When you say it is all semantics, you are ducking the substance of the subject behind the misty screen of language. But the agreements which solidify the apparency of the dinglicheit are much deeper seated than the agreements that form the misty screen of semantic foggery. The subtlety in this particular discussion lies int he fact that the substance under discussion is mind itself; your assertion that it is all semantics merely obscures the question of the substance behind the labels. In the case of Shane this substance may, marginally, be said to exist; but it is a sorry sort of corroded, misbegotten existence indeed, an apology for mind.

By the way this appears to be only the third time the word Dinglicheit has appeared in the entire history of the Mudcat forum. Strangely enough both prior instances were penned by the Being Known as Amos, First Vowel. Coincidence? I don't think so!!!

Amos, amherchi 'm a hynny a llafuriedig at addysga 'm 'n Ffrengig! I have a good notion to turn you over to The Linguistics Division of the Idaho Legion and let them work you over. When they finished telling you about evolutionary sociopsycholingustics and its relation to ambiguity in discourse analysis you'll come begging me to accept your apology.

Your Welsh seems to be almost as bad as your French, good amicus meus. Perhaps you should say what you want to say in English, in order to be understood. Unless of course, your actual intention is to sow confusion and discontent, to satisfy some sort of complex or something,

Amos, your post of 20 Jun 12 - 08:40 PM is perhaps the ultimate example I have seen yet of your unparalleled ability to use words not to enable communication, but to make it virtually impossible! You have reached the utter apotheosis of bafflegab and irredeemable bullroar at last, sir. I can see no remedy other than the application of a permanent gag...or the swift and final strike of the guillotine...to deliver humanity from the intollerable burden of having to endure your interminable and incomprehensible verbiage.